RALEIGH, N.C. -- A federal judge Monday sentenced Robert E. 'Buck' Ward Jr. to 2 years in prison and fined him $200,000 for dumping toxic PCB-laced oil along roads in 10 counties.
It marked the first jail sentences meted out for PCB dumping since the law went into effect in 1978.
District Judge Earl Britt also sentenced Robert J. Burns of Jamestown, N.Y., to 1 years in prison for actually dumping the chemical.
Burns' sons, Timothy and Randall, were put on probation for five years each for taking part in the incident.
Ward and Burns also were ordered to spend five years on probation after they leave prison, and all four men were ordered to spend up to eight hours a week during their probation period working to protect the environment.
Ward's fine came in $25,000 increments for each of the eight counts under which he was convicted. It was the maximum allowable under federal law.
John Ulfelder, head of the Environmental Protection Administration's legal section for pesticide and toxic substances, confirmed the sentences were the first prison time handed out in a PCB case. Another EPA source said 'I don;t think there have been more than four or five' pollution convictions of any sort in which prison sentences have been given. Britt said he might trim the fine in the criminal case against Ward depending on the outcome of several civil suits against the Raleigh businessman.
PCB -- polychlorinated biphenyl -- is used as a capacitor in electrical transformers. It has been linked by laboratory tests to cancer in rats.
During the sentencing hearing, attorneys for Ward and the Burnses argued that the four merely broke governmental regulations instead of committing a crime like murder.
Defense attorney Roger Smith noted that, until the early 1970s, PCB-laced oil used to be tossed onto dirt roads to keep down the dust.
'For years, millions and millions of gallons of this stuff was dumped along the highways of North Carolina and this nation,' he said. 'These people have added to that environmental load 7,500 gallons.... We're not saying what they did was right. But we are saying it was an environmental drop in the bucket.'
Wade Smith, another defense attorney, also maintained that there still are questions about how dangerous PCB is, and therefore Ward and the Burns should not be penalized harshly.
But U.S. Attorney James Blackburn said it wasn't their job to decide the worth of the law -- only to enforce it. He also argued that Burns in particular was more than disobedient; he showed a 'carelessness, perhaps laced with arrogance' regarding the statutes.
